Daniel

“Thus, for instance, what if we thought of domestic violence shelters and sexual assault agencies, not as the antiviolence movement, but as agencies that could potentially support an independent antiviolence movement and perhaps provide a political buffer between the movement and the state? This thinking has deepened the analysis by organizers on how to not just organize beyond the NPIC, but to think more critically about how to organize within the context of capitalism in general.”
― Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

“In addition, the Non-Profit Industrial Complex promotes a social movement culture that is non-collaborative, narrowly focused, and competitive. To retain the support of benefactors, groups must compete with each other for funding by promoting only their own work, whether or not their organizing strategies are successful. This culture prevents activists from having collaborative dialogues where we can honestly share our failures as well as our successes. In addition, after being forced to frame everything we do as a "success", we become stuck in having to repeat the same strategies because we insisted to funders they were successful, even if they were not. Consequently, we become inflexible rather than fluid and everchanging our strategies, which is what a movement for social transformation really requires. And as we become more concerned with attracting funders than with organizing mass-based movements, we start niche marketing the work of our organizations. Framing our organizations as working on a particular issue or a particular strategy, we lose perspective on the larger goals of our work. Thus, niche marketing encourages us to build a fractured movement rather than mass-based movements for social change.”
― Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

“When he was with a client, he had to be careful not to use any of the forbidden words. Struggle, resist, rebel, queer—and a host of others—were considered too radical by the State and had been banned decades ago, replaced with more innocuous words such as 'to make effort ', 'to dispute' and 'to betray'. Queer, having passed through 'LGBTQIA+' at the turn of the century and 'Sexual and gender divergents' to decades later, now had no permissible equivalent that wasn't a slur. As the linguists working in the State knew very well, without a vocabulary to express it, there could be no concept. By banning the very idea of queerness, they hoped that the people themselves would also disappear.”
― Otter Lieffe, Margins and Murmurations

“He intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution